substance misuse

In many European countries, one or more general population surveys have been carried out to get an impression of the characteristics of illicit drug use at national level. Despite valuable efforts to standardise national drug surveys among the general populations in European Member States and to enhance cross-national comparability, national drug surveys still use different instruments, reporting formats and methodologies.

This report presents a number of contributions that relate to analysing communal wastewaters for drugs and their metabolic products in order to estimate their consumption in the community. This area of work is developing in a multidisciplinary fashion, involving scientists working in different research areas. For this reason, the contributions to this publication come from a variety of different perspectives including: analytical chemistry, physiology and biochemistry, sewage engineering, spatial epidemiology and statistics, and conventional drug epidemiology.

Substance Misuse Management in General Practice (SMMGP) is a developing network to support GPs and other members of the primary health care team who work with substance misuse in the UK. The project team produces the Substance Misuse Management in General Practice newsletter (Network), and organises the annual conference 'Managing Drug Users in General Practice'.

An examination of the domestic cultivation of cannabis in England and Wales. This report examines the domestic cultivation of cannabis in England and Wales. Traditionally cannabis has been imported into the country by drug traffickers, but the extent of home cultivation has grown rapidly over the past decade, and home growing now accounts for a significant amount of cannabis consumed in this country.

Report of a study carried out to identify the processes involved in service delivery, including intervention approach, the implementation and integrity of Families First, a multi-component support service for adults and families with substance use issues, interagency working together with the outcomes of intervention for participating families.

This article, pages 8 and 9, covers news and views from the second national service user involvement conference in Birmingham. Using results of a consultation at the event, DDN looks at whether service users had been offered choices about treatment - and whether those choices had worked well for them.

Mind is a leading mental health charity in England and Wales and has produced information on many areas of mental health. Physical activity can boost mental wellbeing and change your outlook on life. It can help people with anxiety and depression, and might even prevent such problems from developing in the first place. This booklet provides practical advice about ways of building more activity into your life, and identifies ways to help you stick to a more active lifestyle. It's not designed to give detailed information about individual activities.

The overall aim of this review was to establish the effectiveness of SDF in delivering its aims and objectives, in particular the extent to which it provides value for money in respect of funding received from the Scottish Government; and to evaluate the current and future capacity of the organisation to deliver value for money in light of the new strategic approach to tackling drug use in Scotland.

Harm reduction has become one of the most contentious issues in drug use policy. The initial clarity and simplicity of the phrase "harm reduction" has evolved into an emotion-laden designation that has polarized groups with a common goal and is interfering with opportunities to engage high-risk populations and the implementation of a range of substance abuse services and supports.

This discussion paper sets out the Scottish Government's strategic approach to tackling alcohol misuse. It illustrates the scale of alcohol-related harm in Scotland and how addressing this can help to deliver a Wealthier and Fairer, Safer and Stronger, Healthier and Smarter Scotland.